About Alan Hayward

I've been working as an archivist at the Discovery Museum for over ten years. I really enjoy the variety of the job. My time is usually divided between selecting which documents should be preserved in the Archives, cataloguing them and helping visitors to our searchroom to interpret and understand them. I recently completed a special fifteen month project to catalogue the Sunderland shipbuilding records we hold.

This blog has been written by Colin Boyd, a volunteer (and good friend) who has been helping to catalogue the plans in our remarkable Vickers Armstrong collection. Whilst working on the Vickers Armstrongs archive I came across a very good… Read more

The shipbuilding collections at Tyne & Wear Archives are widely recognised to be of outstanding historical significance. They have attracted international research interest and back in 2013 were given official recognition through their addition to the UK Memory of the… Read more

As readers of murder mysteries well know, when a body is found in a large country house it’s usually the butler that did it. While this is just a crime fiction cliché, research that I recently carried out at North… Read more

A few months ago I spent a morning at North Tyneside Local Studies Library, with my colleague Sarah Younas, looking through old editions of the Shields Daily News. We were searching for the stories behind some of the First World War… Read more

Over the past six months I’ve been popping into the local studies libraries in North Shields and South Shields to look through local newspapers from the early Twentieth Century. The reason for this has been my fascination with one particular… Read more